


Quick Break

by LeDiz



Series: The 48: Dreamworks [4]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, also a random guy, and a random cat, exasperation with friends, not angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 07:12:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7608694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeDiz/pseuds/LeDiz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After 300 years of solitude, having friends can be really, really... frustrating. Sometimes, Jack just needs a break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quick Break

It’s a funny thing, being alone for so long.

He’d seen it in his children, before. Seen it when he started his snowball fights. Sometimes he would pull in a child that had looked so alone, and for hours, it would be fun, with laughter and play, but then the game would end, the other children would reach out, and the lonely child would leave.

He’d never understood it, before. He would walk them home, demanding they explain themselves; begging them to go back to the other children. This was their chance to join in – have friends! Why—no, _how_ —could they give that up?

Now, walking slowly along the powerlines in a part of the world he almost never visited, he thought he might understand.

When he’d left this morning, he’d had no idea he would end up here. It was usually too dry, too hot. It wasn’t a risk, per se – it was his season, and he sent his share of magic this way every year, so he wasn’t at risk of melting or fever. But the snow would never come here and he had trouble controlling what hail he could make. This place wasn’t his idea of fun. So he never came.

But for some reason, that, and the knowledge that no one would look for him here because of it, had suddenly made it feel very attractive.

Three hundred years. Three _hundred_.

He’d been alone for so long. Spent centuries talking to people that ignored him. Decades surrounded by people but with only his own company to keep him sane.

Debatably.

Every so often, he would have run-ins with other Immortals, or even the Guardians. He would have short—painfully short—intervals of social interaction, and then he would invariably screw up and they would leave.

He’d hated it. Hated himself. Hated the Man in the Moon. Hated everything. He’d done things he now realised were stupid. Things that he was now grateful hadn’t worked. He’d wanted so badly for just one of them to – to – to want him. To reach out. To _try_.

Now they were. Had. Did.

And if they didn’t leave him the heck alone he was going to lose his _mind_.

The attention was amazing. He felt loved. He loved it. He spoke to Tooth or North and they spoke back, sometimes without even glancing up, it was so natural. He and Sandy spent hours together, building shapes with snow and sand, trying (and usually failing) to outdo each other. He made jokes about Bunny, and Bunny always responded. He had peers. He had companions. He had… he…

He liked them.

But after three hundred years, friends were a bit…

A bit much.

Ice didn’t form under his feet here. Just frost that would melt with the first rays of sunlight. He skipped lightly over the cars, coating each one that dared to be surrounded by less than three walls in a thin layer of frost that would make them slow to start. Not enough to stop them – just enough to irritate their owners.

Like a thin layer of snow on Easter morning, in the Northern hemisphere.

He grinned and skipped into the breeze, then spun his staff to send flickers of ice to each door. Bunny had been a constant for so long. His favourite chew toy. Especially when Easter fell in late April – the look of fury on the kangaroo’s face…!

And it wasn’t like he didn’t know where to draw the line. He never touched Bunny’s favourite little continent at that time of year, even though some years, and in some cities, he would have been able to. In fact, he mostly stayed out of Australia altogether. Sure, it was at least partly for his own good, but that sure hadn’t kept him out of Melbourne a few years back on North’s day.

He’d really been hoping that one would have surprised the Workshop defences into being a little understaffed, but they all just took it in stride, annoyingly. Because who cared if it had snowed on Christmas day? In Australia. In a city that was lucky to see slush once a year. The _humans_ had called it a miracle. The least North could have done was be distracted enough for Jack to get past Phil.

He set his staff down on a water feature that immediately froze over, and lifted himself up into a one-armed hand-stand, the other out for balance as he looked around.

Phil. He actually called the yeti by name for more than just irritation value, now. All of them. Not ‘big palooka one’ or ‘hairy idiot sixteen’, but Phil. And George. And Gregory and Oswald and Markus and Karl and ughhh…

He glared at a cat that was perched on a nearby roof, who glared right back. “I’m even starting to _understand_ some of them,” he complained. “They’re making me stick around so much I’m starting to speak yeti! Even Tooth can’t speak yeti, and she’s part bird!”

The cat stretched, yawned, and settled down to continue glaring at him, so Jack flipped around to cling to the side of his staff instead, where he could meet the gaze evenly.

It wasn’t that he disliked Phil and the others. He did like them. Just like he liked North and Tooth and Sandy and… he glanced at the cat sideways, as if warning it not to read his mind. Yeah, he could maybe admit to liking Bunny. A little.

He even liked spending time with them. He loved building with Sandy and playing with Tooth and her fairies. North’s workshop was, in his personal opinion, the best indoor place in the world, and he had spent whole days perched on the windowsill of North’s office, watching him build and play, without noticing the time slide by, even as he chatted about toys and lights and the best parts of the winter months.

But… but even as much as he enjoyed that…

He flung himself up and into the wind, spreading a cold breeze as he was flung away to mountains he was more familiar with. He coated them with a light snow storm, and touched down in the middle of a street as dawn began to hint its way through the clouds. Lights were turning on in houses, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets, staff hooked between his elbows and back as he strolled through the city.

This was nice. He was starting to miss this.

The problem with this whole Guardian thing—with people who had never really known solitude in general, actually—was that they always wanted you around. They were constant, unending. They all knew, like it was a universal truth, that what everyone wanted was either work or social fun times. Even Tooth and Sandman, who were always working! When they weren’t, they wanted to hang out. With him. Like he was special or something.

And it was like they were trying to make up for lost time, or something. They wanted to talk. They wanted to get to know him. To hear about everything he’d done in the last three hundred years. Everything he’d thought and felt and it was really kind of awkward.

Not to mention annoying.

He liked them. He really did. He enjoyed their company. And he would fight alongside them to the bitter end. He trusted them with his life, even if he wasn’t too sure he could trust himself with theirs.

But his heart… yeah, no, that was something else.

He couldn’t even tell them when he needed a break. The one time he’d tried – when he’d just said he needed to be on his own for a while… North and Tooth had given him this look, like he’d… he didn’t even know how to describe it! Tooth had actually started to apologise! And North tried to _talk_ about it. Like something was bothering him.

But all he’d needed was just… just this. Some time to be himself. Some time by himself.

The problem, he decided as he watched a young man jump out of his house, dressed in insulating runner gear and still feeling cold enough to dance in place as he locked the door, was that after three hundred years of being ignored by the world, he’d kind of gotten used to it. And not just the bad stuff that made Tooth’s eyes water and Bunny look like he wanted to punch stuff. Being alone wasn’t all hidden hurts and feeling a little stunned when people invited him places.

The man paused, his eyes sliding around in confusion, and Jack couldn’t help a silly grin. He was starting to recognise this, especially in adults. It was the weird thing about his particular style of belief that none of the other guardians had. Because he didn’t bribe kids, they didn’t think about staying up or out in the cold to see him. It took someone telling them stories for them to believe. To see. But adults… adults did think about him. They didn’t _believe_ , but sometimes they thought about him, and it was almost enough. Not quite, but almost.

It was how he’d survived for so long, he’d theorised recently. He didn’t have the kids’ belief, but he’d had adult thought. That had been enough to keep him strong.

Even if they always got his appearance screwed up.

“I’m not an old man!” he shouted abruptly, spinning his staff out and around. It caused a particularly cold wind that made the man shiver and start his morning run, but Jack didn’t let up. “You see a beard on this face? I am not Old Man Winter!”

But the runner was already out of sight, so Jack huffed and went back to his stroll. “Just because I have white hair… it’s not always about being old, you know. I’m an ice elf. Yeah. That. Whatever that is. You hear that? Ice elf!”

He had no idea what an ice elf was, but he’d decided that’s what he was. And it wasn’t like anyone was going to contradict him. So that was that.

He smirked and bounded onto a car, before leaping up a few buildings and onto the rooftops, where he threw himself into a sprint, leaping over alleys and dragging the cold wind with him.

This was what he missed. His own thoughts, his own pace. No one to tell him he was being foolish, or to get confused at his strange trains of thought, or ask why he felt a sudden urge to run when he’d been walking before.

He’d grown used to his own oddities, and he was getting a little bit sick of people telling him they were emotional scars.

As he flew up over the mountains, he absently waved to a few Immortals that eyed him warily but didn’t comment. He didn’t know their names, just that they were bigger and older than he was, and that the multi-coloured snake could probably eat him whole and not even notice. But like most of the Immortals he’d ever known, they mostly ignored him, and today, that was all he wanted.

He flipped in the air, riding the currents listlessly.

Three hundred years, he’d spent wishing to be acknowledged. Wanting to be believed in. Needing friends and people to talk to. And it wasn’t that he was ungrateful. He really liked the other Guardians, even when North squeezed the air out of him in a bear hug or Tooth felt the implacable urge to manually inspect his teeth.

But sometimes… sometimes, after the snowball fight, the lonely kids just waved and went home, back to their books and computers, and themselves. In a few days, they might start to miss the other kids again, but at the same time…

Jack smiled as the wind drove him up, leading him to frost over other places he barely touched every year.

It’s fun to play with others, but after a while, the best company could sometimes just be yourself.

**Author's Note:**

> The 48 are a collection of unfinished fics saved on my hard drive. There are quite a few for Rise of the Guardians that aren't unfinished, so much as they're just... pointless. Character studies, what have you. Mostly posted in case anyone is interested.


End file.
